Endpoint Company Culture & Values

What is the biggest challenge to establishing a virtual-first company culture? 

There are a few, one of the biggest being engaging employees. When we’re in an office, conversations, picking each other’s brains, social interactions and spontaneous meetings all happen naturally, without needing to schedule them. When we work remotely, we often lose that engagement.

Another is building connections. New connections, especially, we find more difficult to build virtually. For our new hires or individuals new to teams, it becomes more difficult to build relationships with coworkers.

And finally, inclusivity. When you’re in an office, it’s easy to include everyone because, often, they’re right next to you. When remote, our employees have more flexibility in their days, which also means we need to make a concerted effort to ensure everyone is able to join events, meetings and social gatherings. That means paying extra attention to who might be on vacation, in a different timezone and have commitments outside work. 

How is Endpoint working to overcome that challenge?

Getting together in person to connect with team members live and build relationships with the person on the other side of Slack has a big impact not just on morale but also on building understanding and empathy for improved collaboration.

Transparency is also important and becomes crucial when working remotely. We host company all-hands meetings every other week to share important updates, celebrate wins, address concerns and ensure our employees get face time with our leaders.

Our people management tool, 15Five, was chosen to ensure that we gather accurate engagement data and have a designated place for our managers and employees to connect and keep track of conversations. We ask our employees to complete three annual engagement surveys and weekly check-ins to reflect on how they are feeling about their work. This enables managers to proactively manage performance, provide feedback and gather insights on how their employees are doing.

Company information should be easy to access, navigate and understand. This is the first step to transparency. We ensure that our intranet site has all these components and make it easy for employees to find our strategy, OKRs and monthly happenings. We also think it’s important to have tools that make it easy for employees to collaborate and drive alignment.

We elevate our employee experience by creating connections and highlighting various employee interests. We build and execute events that create space for collaborating outside of work so employees can get to know one another more intimately. 

What’s your number one tip for fostering connection and/or collaboration among virtual teams?

Establish a company effort to connect and make connecting easy. Implement tools, have leaders emphasize and model the behavior, set the expectations and ask employees for their feedback. Whether it be virtual, in person, as a company or in teams, we see happier employees, more innovation and better business outcomes when we get together.